Demolition at the White House with no oversight

Kos of Daily Kos wrote about the scam PACs of the 2024 election cycle. These are groups that sent emails and texts that screamed, “Donate! Help us defeat...” They raked in $678 million and less than $11 million went to Democratic candidates or the party. “This is theft—pure and simple—bleeding the progressive movement dry while the right builds real power.” These PACs did spend some money on campaigns – on political ads. Kos calls them “grossly inefficient.” Better to spend the money on voter registration and door-knocking. The main point is Democrats will have a hard time winning while these organizations still exist. Better that we citizens donate directly to candidates. That got me wondering. Did the Democratic Party know about these groups? Did they let them stay in operation? Think they were doing good work? Try to shut them down? Or were they really Republican organizations pretending to be progressive to suck money out of the progressive cause? Yeah, that last bit sounds all “deep state” and conspiracy minded, but since this is about Republicans who have proved how willing they are to ruthlessly cheat I wouldn’t be surprised if is was true. Kos also wrote about the latest from Sen. Rick Scott, Florida Republican. In response to Zohran Mamdani doing quite well running for New York mayor as a Democratic Socialist, Scott introduced a resolution in the Senate declaring socialism to be the greatest threat to the nation. He claims “it is a proven path to tyranny, starvation, and death.” Scandinavia would disagree. Their socialist democracies are doing quite well, thank you. It seems the nasty guy would also disagree. Maybe not in words, but in actions. He has been doing quite a lot to interfere with capitalism. He’s demanded the purge of DEI programs, bullied executives, and demanded an ownership stake in Intel. Maybe Scott should have a chat with the nasty guy? Emily Singer of Kos wrote that about the jobs numbers released on Friday. The June numbers were revised downward to a loss of 13,000 jobs. July numbers were revised up a bit (I had heard early reports elsewhere that the July revision was also down). And in August a measly 22,000 jobs were added. A month ago the jobs numbers were bad enough the nasty guy fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This month he posted about – Jeffrey Epstein. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the nasty guy is ready to start work on his ballroom. The first part is demolition of some parts of the East and West Wings. The nasty guy named Will Scharf to be the head of the National Capital Planning Commission, the organization that oversees and approves changes to the White House. And Scharf says the NCPC has no jurisdiction over the demolition process. Mighty convenient. I previously wrote the nasty guy said it would be paid for through donations – as in another way to bribe him. Needham concluded:

So, let’s recap. We don’t get to know anything about the demolition of the White House, because there is no oversight and no approval process. And we don’t know anything about what the ballroom will actually look like, because there are no building plans yet. Then we don’t get to know anything about the contractor [who is named] because they didn’t have to go through an approval process. And we don’t know how it is being paid for. All we really do know is that, because Trump is involved, it is going to be tacky as hell.

Singer reported that recent comments from Robert Kennedy Jr. imply he is laying the groundwork so he can limit the access to mifepristone, one of the two medical abortion drugs. Sister sent me a link to an article in Smithsonian Magazine, written by Brandon Tensley. It is a short article about Frank Kameny. He was an astronomer with the Army Map Service, but fired because he was gay. This was a part of the Lavender Scare of the 1950s when being gay was considered a governmental security risk because gay men could be blackmailed. He appealed his firing all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear his case. A year before Stonewall he coined the slogan “Gay Is Good.” He was an early activist in the LGBTQ struggle for equality. He played a big role in getting the American Psychiatric Association to say homosexuality was not a mental illness. I had heard much of that before. There is a bit I didn’t know. Kameny kept notebooks. Two of them are now in the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History. Included in the notebooks is information about what bars and restaurants he had been to were gay-friendly. What Kameny intended to do with those recommendations is not known. Since he didn’t publish them perhaps they were only for the use of himself and friends. However, this article speculates if he had published them they would have been the first LGBTQ equivalent of the Green Book which black travelers used to avoid discriminatory businesses during Jim Crow.